The Stoneleigh Court Apartment Hotel — 1923/1924
by Paula Bosse
Still standing, still beautiful…
by Paula Bosse
Above, the Stoneleigh Hotel (originally known as the Stoneleigh Court Apartment Hotel) in 1923, in its final weeks of construction. When the Stoneleigh opened in October, 1923 at the corner of Maple Avenue and Wolf Street, it was a swanky apartment house, with hotel amenities (a few rooms were set aside for “transient” travelers). Thankfully, the Frank J. Woerner-designed building still stands and remains a lovely hotel.
Originally there were 125 apartments (which ranged from 1-5 rooms each), all of which were fully furnished (linens, silver, kitchen utensils, dishes, telephones, etc.), and maid service was provided. There were also radios in every room (a pretty new-fangled thing at the time). Each apartment had a kitchenette and a private bath, and ice water was piped to all apartments. Another innovative feature was the Servidor delivery service which allowed residents and hotel staff to conduct transactions without ever having to look one another in the eye or exchange stilted chit-chat. There was a grocery store, a pharmacy, a beauty shop, and a barber shop on the premises. There were smoking rooms, billiards rooms, and lounges on the ground floor and a grand ballroom on the top floor. And apartments were “handsomely furnished, [with] a color scheme of taupe, blue and mulberry being observed alternately on the various floors.” Sign me up!
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Below, an early ad (click to see a much larger image of the illustration on its own).
And, of course, the obligatory postcard in which the building looks familiar, but which its surroundings seem somewhat … romanticized.
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A grainy photo from the construction and its caption:
Dallas Morning News, April 22, 1923
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Sources & Notes
Photo of the building nearing the end of its construction is from the application to the National Register of Historic Places, which can be found in a PDF, here. (Dallas Historical Society photo.)
Ad is from the 1924 Terrill School yearbook.
To read a lengthy article published a few days before the Stoneleigh officially opened — “Stoneleigh Court Most Pretentious Apartment Hotel in the Southwest” (Dallas Morning News, Oct. 14, 1923) (with “pretentious” used here in a good way!) — click here.
Not sure what an “apartment hotel” is? See Wikipedia, here.
The Stoneleigh is currently called “Le Méridien Dallas, The Stoneleigh,” and the official website is here.
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Copyright © 2015 Paula Bosse. All Rights Reserved.
Flashback : Dallas 
In creating the old neighborhood history, here is one great story as it was in the early beginning..while the Maple Ave address became quite fancy, some of it is railroad and some of it is from the early Love Field traffic while it was the turtle Creek and Cedars Springs that made such a location a delight in the 1920,s and 1930, s….
And some historians have suggest F.D.R came to the Hotel before or after the dedication of Lee Park in 1936…
.While it was also a hang out for the Dixie Mob and later the great number of movie and theater stars who came here, it is still a mystery today but a great story …
Thanks Paula for you deep interest in places only in Dallas can we call sacred….
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I have always loved the Stonleigh hotel and have been in the tunnels under it. I have looked for some history on the tunnels but have found none.
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Where do the tunnels go?
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Paula,
I live in The Crestpark of Highland Park Building. It was built in 1950 as a hotel and had mostly one bedroom units. So it sounds like it was basically an “apartment hotel” too.
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[…] small strip of shops which were built in 1923 at Maple and Wolf, directly across from the brand-new Stoneleigh Court, which, though now a hotel, began life as a very fashionable apartment-hotel (an apartment house […]
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